beakl 8

introduced an unorthodox left hand placement with the I on the bottom row
posing a bit of a reach for some (I had no difficulty with this despite small
hands, and took to the HE and KE bigrams)..

beakl 9

the current recommended BEAKL layout, utilizes a common left hand IEA home
row vowel cluster to eliminate the vowel reach of BEAKL 8 (but at the expense of
the HE bigram which I found quite awkward for my ring finger, along with the
oddity of finding the Q on the home row, even if relegated to the pinkie
finger)..

beakl 10

centers the R on the right hand home row to maximize the R bigram rolls
along with the many other bigrams (very nice)..

beakl mu

by combining the BEAKL 8 left hand and the BEAKL 10 right hand, very little
adjustment is required to obtain the strengths of both layouts..

While the Apostrophe is less common than the Comma, placing the Apostrophe under
the middle finger provides for more fluid typing of possessives, whereas, the
Comma is a sentence structure separator which inserts, however subtly,
a pause into the composition (thought) process itself – hence, this particular
punctuation arrangement choice.

effort metrics

for English composition, BEAKL MU bests all BEAKL layouts (up to and
including
version 10 so far) on the
KLAtest effort model – for
what it’s worth.

Metrics, of course, don’t tell the whole story. The proof is in the
usage. The
hybrid layout “feels” very good. But is it better than BEAKL 8? The differences
between the various BEAKL layouts is subtle and preferences for one layout over
another is highly personal. BEAKL 8, thus far, remains my baseline and
I continue to use it – with the above left hand punctuation
modifications.

mu max

swapping the X and Z keys yields a subtle layout variant which
scores (and feels) a touch better and is what I have settled on for
now..